I haven’t been getting around to posting much recently, been a bit busy with one thing and another, but here’s a few preliminary sketches I’ve done recently. I can’t say too much about them just at the minute, maybe later. I hadn’t really studied vikings much from the point of view of creating character sketches, so it was fun doing a bit of research on armour and weapons. And no Vikings rarely, if at all, wore horns on their helmets!

I know, I know, bad pun, but what else was I going to call this post!?

Here’s a guy I’ve been working on the past week, for a bit of modelling practice, but also more importantly for texturing practice. I haven’t really done much in the way of painted textures in Blender, so I thought I’d work on this and see where I got to. The AMD Radeon 6750 in my IMac seems to handle the viewport GLSL display pretty well. So here he is. He has a basic rig for posing, but I’m going to work up a proper animation rig over the next couple of weeks and see how he turns out. Might be a bit tricky with the shell, but we’ll see. He doesn’t have a name yet, so suggestions on a postcard, please!

Here’s the latest mesh of Sally, co-star of our 3d short, iRover. I think this is pretty much the finished mesh now. I still have some tweaks to add in a few folds to her clothes, and I need to work some more on her textures, like her eyelashes, eyebrows and hair. I’ve decided not to use particle hair in this, I still haven’t quite got the hang of it, so I’m sticking to poly hair for now. She’ll also need a couple of wardrobe changes throughout which I’ll work on later. But this will be enough for now to work on a rig. I did some mild tweaking to her face and head, my previous version seemed a little too young in my opinion, you can see the comparison in the pic below. I think you’ll agree she looks a lot more natural.

I’m not getting as much time as I’d like to get any finished drawings done these days, between one thing and another, but still I’m still managing to get a few sketches done here and there. Here’s a few randoms from my Moleskin.

Bit of a random sketch dump this week, a couple of pics from my pub moleskin, and a couple of topical coloured pics where I was testing out various brushes, pens and paper and practicing my colouring in Photoshop. The Dredd pic was done with brush and Tikky pen on very thin paper which wrinkled quite a lot when I blocked ink with the brush, but I was able to save it in the scan. Fink is pretty much based on the classic Mike McMahon pic, thought it would be a great tryout for my Gpen on the bristol board. That’s all, really!

Here are the current set of Vampire concepts for Table Warfare for the online browser game at Monarchy.com as per my previous posts. At some stage in the not too distant future, these will be used as reference for some miniature character sculpts, I’m pretty very excited to see that happen.

There’s a few tweaks to some of the costumes partly because I didn’t like some of the designs and partly because I don’t think they were done very well! Really like the way these have progressed and I’m pretty pleased with how they’re looking now.

Here’s another concept design for the Monarchy Game, done in the same style as the previous. I ended up redrawing his head and Photoshopping it over the original pencil drawing. Not sure yet how well this will work as a sculpt and mould but hopefully it should be okay.

I’ve been asked by Table Warfare to produce a few character designs, which will eventually be sculpted into miniatures for their game Monarchy. I produced a few rough thumbnail sketches for poses to run past Oliver. This is the sketch for a female vampire which I produced using the Brushes app on the iPhone.

I wanted the finished art to be a pencil sketch so it could also be used for artwork for the website if necessary. Here’s the pencil sketch which was scanned and worked up in Photoshop with a bit of colour and a few textures thrown into the back ground. I’m going to try to keep this style for all the character designs. I’m really excited to see her in her sculpted form.